A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

I had two big book-shopping trips around last weekend -- one to a comics shop and one for a new reading project -- and since I love lists, I'll run through what I picked up.

The reading project is something I think I've mentioned before here, but just became more urgent: I've been thinking about reading a bunch of the Vintage Contemporaries series for the past year or two, and accumulated a few of them. But I was doing a bit of research online, and realized that right now is the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of that series: the first seven books came out in September 1984. So my plan is now to read in that series in publication month (plus thirty) as much as possible, focusing on the originals and probably starting with Bright Lights, Big City later this month. (But I'm also looking forward to reading more obscure things by writers I'm not familiar with as well -- especially women writers, like Emily Prager, Gladys Swan, and Janet Hobhouse, since I think I semi-ignored women writers as a teenager in the '80s.)

So I went out to my local used book store, the Montclair Book Center, and got a nice stack of Vintage Contemporary, which I'll just present as a list (since I'm sure 99% of you don't care about 1980s literary fiction):

I'm focusing entirely on the early Vintage Contemporaries, with those great slabs of color and dot-filled covers. (It looks the style shifted in about 1988, which gives me four years of books to gather.) And reviews of some of them should start showing up here within a few weeks -- though I'm also still building out my spreadsheet of what VC published and when.

Pretty much everything else is comics -- some of these are replacements for flood-lost books, some of them are new stuff, and they came from various places. But here's what's new in La Casa Hornswoggler:

Scott McCloud's Zot, Book 1 -- the late-90s Kitchen Sink edition, containing the first ten issues (in color) of the series that didn't make it into the larger, later, and still available HarperCollins edition. I'm still hoping someone will reprint Destroy!!! one of these days.

The Potpourrific Great Big Grab Bag of Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley
-- the fourth treasury of the newspaper strip with strips from the
2007-2008 time period. I missed this one the first time around, but I
like reading treasuries of strips I like, so I grabbed this when I saw
it and recognized I was missing it.

Strip Joint a collection of Carol Lay's "Story Minute" strips from the mid-90s. Interestingly, this is also a Kitchen Sink book -- that's a press I don't think I appreciated enough while it was around.

An Age Of License, the new graphic novel by Lucy Knisley -- author of Relish and French Milk -- the story of her 2011 European book tour and related stuff, from a creator almost too young and talented and enthusiastic to believe.

Isaac the Pirate, Vol. 2: The Capital by Christophe Blain, also because I recently read the first volume and really enjoyed it. This series, though -- unlike Kindt's -- is not still running; there's only one short French book left untranslated, and I get the sense that even that isn't the real ending. But the world is large and time is long; you never know what will happen next.

Two "Abe Sapien" books from Mike Mignola's Hellboy universe -- the first volume, The Drowning (my review), and the fourth, The Shape of Things to Come. The first of those is written solo by Mignola with art by Jason Shawn Alexander; the latter is written with Scott Allie (Mignola's editor) and drawn by Sebastian and Max Fiumara.

Jeff Lemire's recent DC miniseries in book form: Trillium. (I'd vaguely thought that this was an ongoing -- which shows how much attention I'm paying to periodical comics these days -- probably because I'd conflated it with Mind MGMT.) Lemire has done a lot of good stuff, like The Nobody and The Underwater Welder, so I have high hopes for this.

Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black which I reviewed for ComicMix when it first came out. Sala is one of the people I'm concentrating on replacing in this first round of post-flood buying -- along with Kim Deitch, Evan Dorkin, and the Hellboy-verse; I may perhaps be a bit quirky -- and this helps to fill that shelf back up.

Seconds the big new graphic novel by Brian Lee O'Malley. You've probably heard of it; O'Malley is coming off the Scott Pilgrim juggernaut, and it's gotten a lot of press.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi's tough and unflinching short story collection Abandon the Old in Tokyo(see my review from the 2010 run of Book-A-Day), which I think stands as not just some of the best comics stories ever created, but as one of the great short-story collections period. Tatsumi is just that good.

And I've got a box of books from yet another seller on its way to me; one thing that Book-A-Day dependably does is whet my appetite for books, so I end up buying them even faster than I read them. But there's no serious reader who would call that a bad thing.